Sometimes the masses have been driven to Atheism by science. There are
some geometers great in paradox, men who, of all the senses that the
Creator has given to his creatures, have cultivated only one, the
sense of touch,--leaving out entirely that chief sense, which connects
and confirms all others,--_the sense of the invisible_, the _moral
sense_. These _savans_, geometers, physicians, arithmeticians,
mathematicians, chemists, astronomers, measurers of distances,
calculators of numbers, have early acquired the habit of believing
only in the _tangible_. These are the beings who, so to speak, live
and think in the dark; all, which is not palpable, does not exist for
them. They measure the earth, and say, "We have not met God in any
league of its surface!" They heat the alembic, and say, "We have not
perceived God in the smoke of any of our experiments!" They dissect
dead bodies, and say, "We have not found God, or thought, in any
bundle of muscles or nerves in our dissection!" They calculate columns
of figures, long as the firmament, and say, "We have not seen God in
the sum of any of our additions!" They pierce, with eye and glass,
into the dazzling mysteries of night, to discover, across thousands
and thousands of leagues, the groups and the evolutions of the
celestial worlds, and say, "We have not discovered God at the end of
our telescopes! The existence of God does not concern us; it is no
affair of ours!"--Madmen! They do not suspect that the knowledge and
adoration of God are, at bottom, the only business of the creature;
and that all these distances, these globes, these numbers, these
mysteries of the living being, this dissected mechanism of the dead,
these compositions and decompositions of combined elements, these
hosts of stars, and these eternal evolutions of suns around the divine
hand which guides them, have no other reason for existence, for
movement, and for duration, than to compel the acknowledgment, fear,
admiration, and adoration of God, by that supreme sense, that sense
superior to all other senses, that sense imponderable and impalpable,
invisible yet beholding all things,--that sense which we call
_intelligence_!
Alas! it is not that God has denied this sense to these men of
figures, of science, and calculation; but they have blinded
themselves, they have cultivated the other senses so much, that they
have weakened this. They have believed too much in matter, and so they
have lost the eye of the spirit. These men, we are told, have made
great progress in experimental science, but they have made good, evil,
to the People, by saying to them, "We, who are so high, we cannot see
God!--blind men! what do you see, then?"